Big Bazaar & Disney create super-hero mania in stores

Big Bazaar in association with Disney celebrated Super- Hero Mania, its first ever co-branded in-store activation. The initiative was promoted in five major stores across India from August 21-September 20, 2015 at The Great India Place-Noida, R City Mall Ghatkopar-Mumbai, Amanora-Pune, Rajaji Nagar-Bengaluru and Market City-Chennai.

On the conceptualisation of the in-store innovation, Anuradha Singh, Chief-Experience Design, Big Bazaar shares, "The brief was to create a unique environment in the retail store so that the customers can experience the brand and capture their'Super-Hero' moments. We created larger than life elements for high visual impact with complete integration of merchandise for our'Young Customers'.The creative brief outlined was that, this activation would be in the form of "storytelling", which is what the brand stands for today. Also, since immediate brand association is about fantasy, the effort was to create an experience that reflects the feeling of'Larger than life'”.

Zonal VM teams were engaged to work with an external agency in order to execute the Pan-India plan. Every store was planned and detailed out by these teams in terms of number of VM elements, sizes and placement throughout the store. The brand activity attempted to create a Super Hero Zone in the store, showcasing exciting branding elements like dropdowns, gondolas and pillar branding that introduced the Avengers to all the kids'. The'Larger than Life' execution ensured high quality and standardization across stores.

Further Anuradha shares, "Disney helped us with extremely detailed artwork that were then adapted store to store. Valuable inputs from the zonal VM teams in terms of availability and visibly of Disney merchandise across five stores were required, so that the VM elements could be planned on the shop floor accordingly. The whole exercise of planning took about a month, while execution at each site was done within a day, not disturbing the day to day rhythm of the shop-floor.”

The experience has been multi-fold campaign including an Experience Zone, in the form of a Photo Booth which was created for kids to click their Selfies wearing Super Hero props and post on the social media pages as #AvengersAtBigBazaar. This in-store buzz with the social media integration created 51,000 impressions on the social media page. Disney sponsored the props and freebies for all the young customers and also a special edition of Avengers DVD was given on all purchase of Disney and Avengers merchandise.

Sadashiv Nayak, CEO, Big Bazaar shares with P-O-P, "We have found "engagement" to be an invaluable enabler for building shopper affinity. Engagement leads to the store brand staying salient and relevant in the everyday lives of our customers. Big Bazaar has always strived hard to stay a preferred option for families to spend time together at the store. Most of the weekends we find a family spend a large part of the day together in our stores. The children in the families act like the "fun glue" making the entire shopping visit very enjoyable. Through such activations, Big Bazaar gets a delightful opportunity to tell stories and keep the young consumers engaged. Collaborating with brands such as Disney, brings in many learning's of this segment and makes the partnership stronger.”

The retailer is also in talks are to create grand plans for celebrating in-store activations like Mickey's Birthday and Children's Day celebrations during October-November, 2015.